Wayward Terran Frontier: Zero Falls

$42,147

1,053

Total amount: $45,573

(as of 9:18 am pacific Dec 13)

Wayward Terran Frontier: Zero Falls is part space-trader and part exploration-driven ARPG, with a whole lot of functionality packed into the space between. This is the singleplayer prequel to our previous project simply named Wayward Terran Frontier. It is Windows only during development but we are already laying the foundation for a potential port to Mac and Linux in the future.

This game lets you command massive starships with fully mapped destructible interiors.

The game takes place inside the fighters, shuttles, warships, space stations, hollowed asteroid bases and mysterious ancient structures of an abandoned solar system far too dangerous for human colonization.

The system may have been formally abandoned long ago, but it's still heavily patrolled and well defended by mercenaries from various parties with vested interests. If you want access to the only habitable planet you are going to have to fight, and as it turns out you don't have much of a choice. You play a human slave awakened from cryo storage by an errant artificial intelligence. Your AI master wants access to the most heavily guarded planet in the system and it expects your help. With no way home and a huge bounty on your head you are given free reign to solve the problem however you see fit.

Your adventure starts in an abandoned terraforming station deep in the system's asteroid belts. There you will need to explore for resources, reverse engineer advanced technology, customize improve and even design the ultimate warship and eventually make an assault on the heavily guarded inner systems to reach your goal.

Wayward Terran Frontier is a story-driven sandbox game that lets you experience content the way you choose. You have big goals to accomplish, but your immortal masters aren't too particular about how you accomplish them. Explore deep space for surprising artifacts and technology, pick on helpless industrial workers, board transport ships to capture their cargo, collect your fortune from the shredded corpses of your enemies' ships, or if you really want to get your hands dirty grab your pick and start an asteroid mining empire.

The NPC factions have their own motivations and if you ignore them they will go about their business patrolling, trading, mining, building, even fighting among themselves. Your job is to cause trouble and stir things up, but if you attack their supply convoys or assault their outposts, don't be surprised when they call for reinforcements.
Your goal is to disable a sensor net maintained by guard stations around the system, but nobody says you have to destroy them. You can board the stations to disable the sensor net, or just cut off their supply chain and wait for their crew to abandon ship. With no time limit, creativity and planning is your best ally...well creativity, planning, and huge battleships covered in plasma cannons.

Our in-house, custom built game engine allows a unique level of detail for the entire game universe both big and small.

The game takes place in an entire star system with asteroid belts, ice fields, planets, moons, and all sorts of hidden treasures that would take hundreds of hours for an individual to fully explore. Loads of content for a singleplayer indie game. However the engine wasn't originally meant for a single player project. It is built on top of an infinite procedural galaxy with trillions of star systems and quadrillions of planets and unique locations. We never plan to run out of space for adding new content in the future.

We use a data structure for objects with many levels of nested
detail. Every pixel in space holds extra data that allows us to procedurally map object interiors on the fly. That means we can have thousands of objects per sector and millions of objects in a star system yet every space station, every
asteroid, every ship, every little piece of debris that falls off during
combat can be entered and explored by the player at any time. Part of the fun of a big battle is exploring the debris afterwards trying to find parts of a ship large enough for a human to enter. That's where the best loot will be found.

Space combat in Zero Falls is both simple to master and surprisingly deep. The first thing you will notice is there are no health bars in space. That's because every active ship is fully simulated during combat with living crew making decisions, conduits delivering power, engines providing thrust, and mounts rotating guns. A ship is defeated when its crew is defeated, it is disabled when its crew can no longer fight back.
This takes the concept of subsystem targeting to the extreme. A lucky shot might ignite a capacitor bank and start a raging fire, or a well aimed volley could detonate a reactor core and end the fight instantly. You can learn your enemy's weak spots to gain an edge in combat, and you can learn your own weak spots in order to survive.

From the beginning this project was built with mod support in mind, and we plan a comprehensive suite of modding tools in the future. Right now it's already possible to import ships into the game with nothing more than a simple image editor, including specular, emission, and bump mapping. Given sufficient funding we want to provide a data-driven API for ship modules, textures, and even scripting so that tinkerers can define the smallest building blocks that make up this recursively defined infinite universe.

Regardless of what funding goals we reach, our team will always be committed to community involvement and open game design. I personally believe that a game that lets you play can never be as addicting as a game that lets you create, and I love to facilitate community created content of all types.

The early access

We plan to release an early alpha version of the new Zero Falls content that will be exclusive to Backers. Both backers on Kickstarter and via Paypal will have access to the new content within 30 days of the Kickstarter ending.

You will be able to play with game mechanics, test custom ships and ship designs, as well as play an incomplete version of the singleplayer campaign. This will include automatic content and bug fix updates leading all the way up to the eventual launch of the game.

The Tiers

We're a small team, and we have been running pretty lean since our first Kickstarter didn't pan out. However, as you can see we have trudged on regardless. With the project's refocusing and re-branding came a new full time artist who has brought the game to a whole new level of stunning visual professionalism. The game is looking better than ever, and the stuff under the hood is much closer to being ready for prime time. There has never been a better time to ask for your support.

By pledging to this project you are helping us feed ourselves and run the website while we work tirelessly to remove bugs, polish art, and add content to the game.

The budget

The Team

Jan Orszulik - Responsible for the amazing artwork and the website design.

George Hultgren - Responsible for all the game design, programming, server back-end stuff and corporate paperwork.

Risks and challenges

Risk #1: Piracy: The game includes real space pirates! Seriously though, we aren't worried about software pirates and the game is built fully DRM free. The password-protected launcher is a distribution system only and does nothing to prevent you from copying, modifying, or playing your game without an internet connection. Our philosophy is that to beat piracy we should provide a service that is better than free. That's why we offer automatic bugfix and content updates to paying customers, as well as store integration for distribution of exclusive downloads.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 1,000 or more
About $1,000

Nemesis tier. Unlock everything and gain access to the pointlessly extravagant Producer's gold plated luxury yacht with pool and mini-bar. You will also be listed as a producer in the game's credits and on the forums